An Indigenous man in Sydney has died after an encounter with NSW Police. Patrick Fisher, 31, fell 13 floors from a balcony at a Waterloo housing block yesterday after police entered the flat looking to take the man into custody. NSW Police has launched a critical incident investigation, saying “officers attached to Redfern Local Area Command have established a crime scene”. Speaking to the ABC, a relative of Fisher said “he wouldn't have killed himself, he had too much to live for”, and called for an independent investigation into how he died. “They get away with too much here," the relative said. "It's nothing to them, just one less person to chase on the street.”

Barnaby Joyce’s estranged wife Natalie has released a statement on her husband’s infidelity, saying she was “deeply saddened by the news that my husband has been having an affair and is now having a child with a former staff member”. Saying the news was “devastating on many fronts”, Joyce said she “placed my own career on hold to support Barnaby through his political life” and would “be made worse by the fact that this will all be played out in public”. Labor and Greens politicians have criticised The Daily Telegraph for publishing photographs of the former staffer, with shadow treasurer Chris Bowen saying “frankly, his personal situation is none of my business and, with respect, it’s none of anybody else’s business”. Greens MP Adam Bandt, meanwhile, called the coverage “despicable”, saying “the Murdoch tabloids ran a front-page paparazzi snap of a pregnant woman just because the father happens to be Barnaby Joyce”.

Queensland’s Labor government will enshrine human rights such as the right to life, freedom of expression and freedom of movement when it introduces a state bill of human rights. Modelled on Victoria’s Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006, the bill of rights will be Australia’s third charter of rights, after Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory. Rights advocates applauded the news, with Community Legal Centres Queensland director James Farrell saying the reform would provide “stronger protection for people with disability, families threatened with homelessness, women and children experiencing family violence, and many other groups in the community”.

And a date has been set for the Batman by-election, pitting Labor’s Ged Kearney against The Greens’ Alex Bhathal. House of Representatives speaker Tony Smith advised yesterday that the poll would take place on March 17, giving voters in the inner-Melbourne electorate until February 14 to enrol and potential candidates until February 22 to nominate for the by-election to replace David Feeney. March 17 is also St Patrick’s Day, giving headline writers everywhere plenty of material for puns about the colour green should Bhathal win.

“Although only a handful of people knew it, Hudson was in Paris desperately seeking treatment for AIDS – treatment that even a prominent, wealthy actor could not get in the United States in 1985. Although more than 5,500 people had died from the disease by the start of 1985, the government had taken few significant steps toward addressing the disease – with the Reagan administration recommending a $10 million cut in AIDS spending down to $86 million in its federal budget proposal released in February 1985.” buzzfeed

“The conservative political activist James O’Keefe has created a cottage industry manipulating political perceptions by editing footage in misleading ways. In 2018, low-tech editing like Mr. O’Keefe’s is already an anachronism: Imagine what even less scrupulous activists could do with the power to create ‘video’ framing real people for things they’ve never actually done. One harrowing potential eventuality: Fake video and audio may become so convincing that it can’t be distinguished from real recordings, rendering audio and video evidence inadmissible in court.” the new york times

“Antia is home to the last whistlers of Greece. Sfyria, as the whistling language is called in Greek – it comes from the Greek word sfyrizo, to whistle – is not technically a language; linguists refer to it as a speech registrar, like shouting or whispering. It’s the same as modern Greek – the grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure all remain intact – but the sounds come out in high-pitched musical notes.” the outline

“In a tearful statement to Parliament, Labor backbencher Susan Lamb has explained she is not legally allowed to have access to her parents' marriage certificate that could clarify her citizenship status. In a bid to fend off Government attacks that she is a British citizen and ineligible to be in Parliament, Ms Lamb has spelled out that she has been estranged from her mother since she was a six-year-old girl.” abc

“The chamber is absolutely silent as Susan Lamb delivers her statement. She is in tears, as she explains her mother was not there for much of her life ... Alex Hawke starts telling her from across the chamber that he ‘has heard sad stories too’ and says something about her having entered public life. One of his colleagues, I think it was Ian Goodenough, censures him with ‘Alex’ and he stops.” guardian australia

“In a video captured from the sidelines by cricketer Ollie Pope, the woman can be seen yelling that she was ‘doing sit-ups in my backyard’, apparently under the impression that living next to a public oval makes it your private property. ‘But this is a cricket field’, the cricketer trying to escort her off the field protests. “We’ve hired this. We paid money for it’. ‘And I don’t pay rates?’ the woman yells again.” junkee

Mike Seccombe
After two High Court decisions, the fight against federal funding for religious-only school chaplains is set to end with a test case on state anti-discrimination law.You can’t pay someone to break the law, which is what the Victorian government is now doing. And they can’t say, ‘Well, the federal government is paying us to break the law.’

Kate Iselin
The Victorian Liberal Party’s state council has, ahead of this year’s election, endorsed the ‘Nordic model’ to transform sex work laws, but European experiences suggest it can have devastating consequences for workers.

Rebecca Harkins-Cross
She’s a writer whose plays have been widely lauded by critics but largely neglected by the mainstream. Now Patricia Cornelius’s work will take its place on the main stage. “It sounds so hifalutin, but my ambition was really just to be able to create great work … that I felt soared. It never entered my mind that it would happen in the mainstream.”

Annie Smithers
I came across this recipe some years ago and it has become my favourite to move on to once I’m over the ‘sweet’ quince thing. It features Persian overtones, Moroccan influences and rich flavours that are perfect as the nights get colder.

Guy Rundle
The massive expansion of the tertiary sector during the Dawkins era, and the elision of tech institutes and universities, set us off on the wild ride we are still on. Resistance by the humanities was greeted with exemplary punishment – the cheapest courses to teach, they were crowded with tens of thousands of new students and deprived of the funding to cater for them. The problem is worse in Australia than almost anywhere else. Had we a real respect for universities and what they do, the successive depredation of them would have given us a May ’68 redux by now. Instead, the machine hums on.

Paul Bongiorno
The fact is Labor senator Katy Gallagher referred herself to the High Court as a test case for “reasonable steps”. Turnbull’s attack on Shorten for gaming the system is very rich given he argued that Barnaby Joyce was eligible until the court declared otherwise. Joyce remained deputy prime minister and sat in the parliament for 74 days even though he was under a cloud. There is no real substance to the demands that the members now facing the voters again should apologise for the inconvenience and expense the byelections will cost. In all their cases, their good faith is established by their genuine efforts to comply with section 44, according to serious legal advice, which was clearly not the case with the politicians who were bundled out of the parliament last year.

Richard Ackland
This week Gadfly thinks it’s high time to unload some festering snipes and snarls. Take the Australian Press Council as a starting point. The press “regulator” is in the process of rissoling the Indigenous woman Carla McGrath as a public member of the council, on the feeble excuse that her position as deputy chair of GetUp! creates a conflict of interest. What on earth are they on about? The Press Council itself is a conflict of interest, riddled with tired hacks representing their paymasters in the media.

Even the farmers admit it is an increment – the decision by Malcolm Turnbull’s government not to ban live exports over summer, despite evidence of the risk to animals, despite footage of mass deaths and calls from vets to end the trade.The truth is, this is an industry of undue political clout. There are economic arguments against live exports, good ones. There are obvious welfare arguments, too.

Martin McKenzie-Murray
Though the unusual manner in which Aaron Cockman spoke of the alleged murderer of his children and ex-wife – his former father-in-law – was puzzling to many, psychological studies of similar crimes suggest a way to make sense of its seeming contradictions.